Masonry Magazine June 1984 Page. 9
Fabricators and suppliers are responsible for recommending its particular uses, processing its specific shapes and sizes, properly identifying its sequential application, and carefully packaging it for shipment and job-site storage. When any of these factors are certifiably deficient, surely a mason contractor is entitled to a more tangible recourse than desperate verbal appeals to an unseen providence or an unsympathetic architect.
3) Anchorage Systems
Owners or their architects often cite industry standards as an estimate base for a stone panel fastening system. In practice, however, the mason contractor might well be required to produce at his expense, what else? a totally engineered anchorage design system to meet owner/architect criteria far in excess of industry standard, and to then defend, sometimes in vain, the dramatic difference between actual and estimated cost of that design.
The icing on this particular cake is the contract fine print that might commit the mason contractor to erection of a sample wall panel to demonstrate in advance the material specified and the anchorage system proposed. All this might translate specification intangibles into physical reality and hence fortify owner/architect confidence. But it is an unusual architect or owner who has any clear idea of what the prognosis of natural material and its selected anchorage system might be in the long term. And it is, of course, precisely in the long term that contractor reputation and liability-not to mention some very big money-are on the line where a stone panel project is involved.
4) Mock-up Testing
At MCAA's recent Masonry Conference in New Orleans, A.A. Sakhonovsky, head of the Construction Research Laboratory in Miami, Florida, covered the intent, practice and benefits of these procedures, all of which a mason contractor must, of course, take into proper account when submitting a stone veneer bid. It should also be emphasized that, although the tender documents may designate the mason contractor as full cost underwriter of that testing procedure, there might be no special assurance that only one such test will suffice or, indeed, that the actual test facility will be in reasonable proximity to the site.
I leave to your imagination who is expected to build now and pay later the second, third, fifth or tenth wall mock-up at an equal number of guess-where locations, to be decided upon much, much later on apparent whim or impulse.
5) Subsidiary Liability
A stone facing contract involves such subsidiary materials as neoprene, insulation, dielectric paint, caulking, flashing, etc., which normally might be bid as a separate sub-contract by the specialty trades concerned. However, the mason contractor, thinking himself to be a flow-through supplier of only basic natural materials for such a contract may too late find himself-under an obscure performance clause-accepting full technical and functional responsibility for all materials and their use in relation to the stone, granite or marble to be installed.
Hence, more costly pre-bid research to ensure merchandise/workmanship guarantees of every associated material supplier at least equal to the contractual obligations imposed on the masonry sub-trade. How or why the trowel guy, to get a stone panel job, has to become a caulking gun or paint brush operator is a trade mystery I have not yet been able to unravel.
Don't go away; there's a lot more.
6) Coordination
It may be worthwhile to look again at our typical mason contractor, bidding his first stone project (by this time a hollow shell of the gung-ho bidder we met moments ago) and being introduced to the distinction between a supplier and fabricator of natural materials. Sometimes located miles apart or even in two different countries, neither of these operations relieves our hero of the responsibility of constantly monitoring all quarrying, fabricating and shipping schedules so that projected material arrival can somehow be intelligently coordinated with labor and equipment deployment.
Also to be considered are method and quality of material packaging or crating, carrier, equipment, and routing to be used in the delivery process, different federal and/or state taxes applicable to importation of natural materials, insurance protection against in-transit, storage or handling damages, liability coverage for future structural defects and attendant problems.
Who-quarry, fabricator or distributor is responsible to demonstrate in advance that these and other "incidentals" too numerous to mention are being or will be properly handled and, upon inquiry, can be so confirmed by the mason contractor at any time before or during the job?
Assuming all these basic considerations are resolved to a point that encourages the suicidally low masonry price routinely expected of our industry and which then "wins" our would-be stone installer his first natural material contract, we need not here reflect on his further adventures. Instead, let us in kindness leave him to wrestle, alone, outnumbered and outgunned, with such interim disasters as:
• Unannounced changes in material shipping schedules.
• Over-stated building structural capacity for selected anchorage system.
• Fouled-up scaffold design drawings.
• Wrong material color and/or thickness upon eventual site arrival.
continued on page 25
MASONRY-MAY/JUNE, 1984 9